Sit on a Wall

by Jennifer Strange

He watches from his window, his garden, his horse. Every morning, we prepare the horse for a ride to the riverfront and back, and he watches; I know he thinks he has spotted him when he finally pushes to gallop. Just before tea every afternoon, he takes a walk through the garden and peers around every break of hedge to find him. And anyone meeting him for business would assume he had had enough or needed some fresh air to clear his mind for decision, but he has only been sitting distracted so long and must retreat to the window for the real business: has he now set himself at the fountain? The king’s organizes his daily calendar around the great oaf.

But he is gone now.

They say he was once a man of letters who never wrote a false word about the human heart, for he understood it all—the greed, the fear, the love. He managed all the king’s books and all the king’s lies, and he made them all true by visiting the wronged ones and paying everything even. He hosted dinner parties that no one ever wanted to leave, for the company was so rare and the host so gracious: he was responsible for introducing to each other the most unlikely of friends from all corners of the city. He wore shoes no one noticed and lifted his eyebrows just so you knew he had heard you.

But they all say different things about how he fell. The expert in crookneck squash who farms across the cemetery from St. Mark’s says he saw him walk into church one day with his head down and not emerge until the next day, his head lower still. The queen’s farrier says he had long loved the wife of a friend, and that he had confessed only to be spurned. One of the housemaids said he had never been true—that all his good had been a ruse to make the king notice him, to earn fame, and when the king turned out mad after all, he suddenly looked a bit mad himself.

Whatever it was, he turned his face to pie and drink. An excuse to be with friends, an escape from guilt, something to prove he was wheat and not chaff? Perhaps all, but he became an expert in the stuff. Meat pies, berry cobblers, peach pie in season, chicken pot pies, single-crust and double-crust, flakey or with biscuits, sweet or savory. And he knew the right brew for each one. And when he had drunk, he wrote no words whatsoever (though we understand this is uncommon) and forgot whatever company he had kept or abused them terribly with his wit—after only a drink or two, his words revealed clearly all his fear and fawning.

The king had lost sense years before and remembered him as he had been, bless his soul. But we had to remove him from the king’s presence. He had become utterly useless. Couldn’t even read a map anymore, and he added the strangest volumes to the library—a handwritten biography of one of the king’s horses, for example. When he sat for tea, he clattered his cup about the saucer and spilled copious amounts of cream on the carpet. When he walked the gardens, he crouched behind the king and clipped leaves from bushes, emptying his pockets into the fountain while he whistled a minuet.

We gave him a cottage well appointed with books, a globe, a desk with enough paper, a butler with orders to keep a full pantry and never want for pies or beer, and a guard. He was invited to walk about as he wished, though one of the king’s men was to go with him always.

Over those months (or was it just weeks?), the pies and brew pushed out his sides so that we called him again the greatest man in the city. He walked very little and sat very often, with the cook delivering pies and a glass at regular intervals wherever he would go, which wasn’t ever far from his cottage. Sometimes while he ate, he would fall asleep where he sat and not pull to his mouth the spoon he had just filled anew.

One day, his guard called for help—the oaf wished to climb the city wall. So they hoisted him up and he sat. For two days or more, he sat on the wall. His cook brought pies enough for a large family, and he drank barrels. He forgot all that he had ever tried to do. He could not recall a single name of a single person he had ever invited to dinner. He moaned as he looked out from the city.

And then you know the story: he had a great fall. You would not have recognized him if you had seen him. In fact, you would have wondered if he had ever been a man. No horse or man could have healed him: he had a great fall.

The king mourned him, so we too had to as well. He too tried to remember him as he had been, but we could not help remembering what he had become, which was what he really had been all along. The greatest man, the largest man, and so the most pieces we ever found fallen.

War Within Me

“He kindles a fire and bakes bread. Also he makes a god.” — Isaiah 44:15

Evening falls fast now. At the brightest moment, I jump as a tin can falls and pounds the ice, and my martini soaks through the tablecloth. Looking up again, the ochre lets me stare it down into darkness. How quickly the stars take their places and make every shadow grow long as a terror’s fingernails.

Where’s my helper? Where’s some comfort? My knees creak down to the hard ice. Here’s a match, fire, heat, glow. Honey will bring the twigs and we’ll make it right.

It’s a hard edge we picked, but maybe the last one with a view. Spruce, hemlock, cottonwood—a successful canopy. With our binoculars, we spy on the grizzlies and blue grouse, his sac hooting its echoes off the ice. We could sit at this crevice forever. To camp, to set our flag on the wilderness, to dominate. Just to dominate.

Here he gives a brief glance. So many years ago, I looked across a room to look into him. We studied—his left hip (his hand rests there) sits lower than his right, he sneaks a bite of brownie and makes sure I see, he starts a load of whites and thinks I am too busy to mark it. Just a passing word would do then. But when there is no time for more than a passing word, you resent knowing each other so well. We share this house on wheels, this bed and table and shower. We terrorize each other with every polite smile.

I’ll tell it again: he burned that pie I made from scratch. I stirred it up—his daddy’s pecans, and that deep chocolate to make them sweet for him—and it burned while we watched some meaningless show because he heard the beeper but didn’t ask why it was set. Just one of those things you laugh about and let go.

We talked about this RV for years before we bought it. The sales lady told us all the middle-agers say that, but it’s true. Longing for something more than canned noodles with the kids, we set our eyes on the drive and hoped everything would hurry up. We didn’t have any other ideas. Recreation would be our mission field, and 300 square feet our sanctuary. Polished wood, a quick clean, and time.

So where is he now with those twigs? Hunting the glacier, that’s where. Killing a squirrel or two, if he can. The fire will die without his small offering, his twigs. Could I drive this holy habitation away from this godforsaken skating rink? The blue grouse hoots again.

“Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.” One Sunday morning, a boys choir sang that on the radio, the big drums and high young voices echoing through the cathedral where they made the recording. The crowd applauded the performance of the death masque, but I figured they didn’t know much about the song itself, seeing as they were still alive. Seems easy to applaud a song about comfortable death until you go to die.

But here comes my covenant husband, no dead meat in tow but a stack of twigs in his arms. His errand almost complete, he walks to the fire and dutifully places the wood. He stokes our fire on ice. I take another sip of my martini and explain, “The tablecloth.” He nods.

This place is boring, what with its “Would you look at that?” every five seconds. We don’t say it anymore; we just sit in our chairs and stare into the glacier, etched with a gargantuan finger into a Cubist nightmare. Its tumult comes from within, those passions so deep within the ice that erupt in slow but mighty cracks.

One day we’ll miss the children, I suppose. One day we’ll get sick of squirrel. One day we will have learned to make fire and won’t be able to survive with it everywhere. We’ll go to some other habitat and the whitebark pine will take our place in the flames.

How She Ended It

By Jennifer Strange

Inside the box of stale breakfast cereal, she found her marriage. Not in a metaphorical way, now. I mean she found her wedding ring right there in the corn flakes with the dried strawberries and such. She couldn’t remember when it got there, but it must have been that last time that she poured the cereal from the box into that airtight plastic container. Trouble is, the plastic tub isn’t as big as the box, so the bites left in the box are a craps shoot: either they’ll still be good after she eats a few bowls and remembers to top off the tub, or they’ll have become breakfast, lunch, dinner, and grave for weevils.

So there’s her marriage, all dusty with sugar and corn bits, fallen down in a bag in a box in the pantry in the dark. By the time she’d missed her ring, she couldn’t imagine how long it had been gone. What with the dusting and cooking and taking out the dirty cat litter days without end, it could have been last year for all she knew. His always sat on a shelf in his closet, and she never took hers off. Must had fallen somewhere. She figured it would turn up.

Still Life: Old Woman Alone in Her House

by Jennifer Strange

The birds insist on themselves outside the window this temperate day in January, until the air conditioner kicks on and hums itself into first place. Will the annual ice storm come? Swinging won’t make us stay as ice storms do. We light the fire, breathe the ash, make another cup of tea, and wait until summer.

Here, it won’t be a long wait. Summer may come again tomorrow. Then, I will take my walker and pace the block again. Wave to the young boys next door and tell their mother I’m 92. Make the dog at Holly’s house bark a small, serious bark. Peer into the pilot’s windows. Thank that young man with the old dog again for every day moving my newspaper to the front porch. And turn around back home.

The teapot has started to whisper at that pitch only I can hear. “Husband, the water is about to boil,” I would say, but instead, I stir my own honey in the hot water and dip my own tea bag.

Waiting

By Jennifer Strange

Walk to her front porch and you can smell the season: sugar cookies, cardamom bread, gingersnaps, beef stew like her mother made, peanut brittle, fudge sans nuts, divinity for her father-in-law, pumpkin bread, fruitcake with generous amounts of brandy poured over it for days. Walk in and she won’t let you touch a thing. Not until it is time.

Melded recipes from the distaff and the spear, and some of her own creation: her mind is quiet when she bakes.

Remember how white-haired Grandma taught us the beauty of a well-set table. Hers is the fruitcake. Remember how gray-haired Grandma taught us the tenderness and tenseness of family gathered. Hers is the peanut brittle. Remember how Pa learned to bake in his retirement. His is the cardamom.

Maybe one year we will learn to bake only and not to give so many gifts, but we do love giving the gifts. Go from person to person and keep the ritual of caring for the paper. We delight in the imaginations and the individual attentions. All of the gifts are for all of us.

The stockings, which our grandfather needlepointed, will hang around like so many well-crafted witnesses. The angels so sing their chorus. The nativities birth new Christs every year and fill more shelves and corners. Garland, ornaments, candles that smell of pine: it’s everywhere.

“Cold hands, warm hearts,” Grandma would say with conviction. We have the hearths, the pockets, the central heat, and what of those who do not? Yet our hands always seemed cold reaching to the dough, the gift, the deck of cards, the stranger.